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housekeeping

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I’ve done my share of cleaning house over 30+ years of marriage. I stayed home with the kids when they were little and waged the losing battle of keeping their chaos at bay. I once told a college class that managing a house occupied by two toddlers was like composing a term paper with a drunk roommate deleting key passages whenever the writer looked away for a split second. All accomplishments are doomed to erasure.

Doing chores while surrounded by little barbarians gave me a fatalistic approach to house cleaning. I got in the habit of taking care of the worst of the worst, nibbling at the bits I somewhat cared about, and letting major areas collect dust and debris.

Dresser top of lost hope

Recently our circumstances have forced me to take on more of the chores than I ever did before. The kids are grown and gone, so there should be less to do. But now I’m starting to see things through my wife’s eyes and realize that the cobwebs growing from the ceiling in the back room really shouldn’t be allowed to hang down to eye level. The strange odor in the laundry room behind the Christmas tree boxes no longer lingers, but its fossilized source really ought to be removed (dead lizard or corn snake?). Ancient stains on the side of the fridge could be scrubbed off, as well as stratified layers of greasy fuzz on the kitchen ceiling fan.

I eventually come to the conclusion that I could start at one end of the house and scrub inch by inch. Repainting and patching could follow. New curtains could replace the moth eaten ones over the front window, and the coat closet could be excavated for usable tennis rackets, tennis balls, and vacuum cleaner attachments from amongst the debris at the bottom. The job seems endless.

And now I begin to understand a major difference between the sexes. Women tend to see housework as a manageable project that produces a cozy nest if the right effort is applied, if their housemate abstains from random acts of stinky sock/wet towel dropping. Men see the interior of a house and shut down.

Housework induced catatonia in males is not always caused by laziness, but more often by willful blindness in the face of overwhelming odds. The blindness has no evil intent, but is more a matter of self-preservation. A man who has taken the time to do a thorough survey of his domestic environment is like an astronaut spacewalking and contemplating the stars. He feels so small compared to a vast number of tasks spread over a mini-universe of domestic space.

When confronted by the infinite, it’s best for a man to pretend that the majority of it does not exist. He pops a beer, sits in a recliner and waves to his friends, the spiders hanging all around him. He might knock down their webs down in a day or two, but at that moment he just wants a little company.